The Unbroken Window

I honestly believe that “friends of the market” do more damage to the cause of freedom and markets than the statists. Now, we’ve let Randi Weingarten win the day by calling these market reforms: Market-based reformers advocate using student test scores to evaluate and compensate teachers, increasing the number of charter schools, firing teachers in [...]

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From a Heritage rebuttal to Krugman: We used the highly regarded U.S. Macroeconomic Model of IHS Global Insights, Inc. Perhaps this is a model you as a pundit “do not recognize,” but most economists do.  This model has been around in its various forms for nearly 50 years. It contains over a thousand equations and [...]

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I recently waded through Veblen’s famous Theory of the Leisure Class. I found it tough reading, far more of a slog than reading Hayek, and on par with reading some of the great philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th century. In an essay that you simply must read, HL Mencken describes the writing [...]

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I’ve just finished reading Joe Stiglitz’s account of the financial crisis.  In it he makes the following comment: Competition, in this case, had a perverse effect: It caused a race to the bottom — a race to provide ratings that were most favorable to those being rated. Ughh. I guess being a Nobel Prize winner [...]

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Suppose you are a policymaker with clearly specified goals. You determine, with the input of your constituents, that we desire to improve the discipline of Americans, and to have them do a better job of showing up on time. How do you proceed with doing something about this problem? Aside from the obvious start of [...]

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Sadly, for three years running, not much needs to change. Not much has changed in the intervening time. I suppose I could say something about QE2 and fears of deflation as commodity prices soar. I might say what we learned about the original TARP, which was as much of a bailout of European banks as [...]

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No, it’s not because of this (in case you don’t want to sort through it, we’re #7).Why was it dreadful? Because like most other colleges, all it really does is pay lip service to the idea that students will develop critical thinking skills. Amherst still tells its customers that this is what it does. Here [...]

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A market is something which emerges through the actions of everyone but the design of no one. They are part of what Hayek called the extended order of human cooperation.  Recognizing the fact that markets themselves are not consciously created, but that they offer myriad benefits to participants and non-participants alike, raises many questions. Two [...]

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Orthodox Keynesians argue that in times when aggregate demand is slack, it makes no difference whether you employ people to dig holes and fill them back up or whether you actually pay people to produce public goods that are valuable. Suppose we accept this proposition – that it doesn’t matter just so long as the [...]

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“… the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency in Oregon had claimed to create 205 jobs with its $397,761 in stimulus money — spending less than $2,000 per “new” job.” That was from a very good Greg Mankiw article on economic epistemology (i.e. how do we know that we know anything about economics?). Here’s another one: [...]

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